


Shell Game

by Rastaban



Series: The Gospel of Judas [2]
Category: Deus Ex (Video Games), Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Genre: Are Bad At Their Jobs, Canon-Typical Violence, Cyberwarfare, Defective People Making Friends, Everybody Wants To Rule The World, Gen, I Love A Good Conspiracy, Judicious Adjustments to an Already-Scattershot Canon, No One Except Me, Origin Story, Post-Game, The Extensive Backstory No One Asked For, The Grim Cyberpunk Present, The illuminati - Freeform, in-game, pre-game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-23
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-08-07 10:01:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7710799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rastaban/pseuds/Rastaban
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Adam Jensen goes looking for trouble, there's always someone on the other end of the line. And when Adam Jensen turns up more than he bargained for, his isn't the only life turned upside down.</p>
<p>Frank Pritchard can stop doing what he did. But it's not so easy to stop being what he was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prelude: A Nightmare

_"It isn't necessary to have something to believe in. It's only necessary to believe that somewhere there's something worthy of belief."_

\-- The Stars My Destination

 

 

_"Mama Sutra smiled without forgiveness or final condemnation. 'This is no age for saints," she agreed softly. 'Two dollars please.' "_

\-- Leviathan

 

* * *

 

 

 **autoprog.plague.intercept[-1][A Nightmare]**  
**{**

"Wake up, my dear. Hush, hush now. You were only dreaming. Did you have a bad dream?"

"V'ry bad dream, mama."

"Was it scary?"

"V'ry scary."

"We all have scary dreams sometimes, my darling. But they are only dreams inside our heads. What do we do with the insides of our heads?"

"Keep them neat."

"That's right. We keep them nice and neat like our rooms."

"Story?"

"Hmm. Which book do you want?"

"No. Mama tell me a story."

"A story about what?"

"Someplace far away."

"Very well. Hush now. Be a good girl, and listen. Once upon a time there was a faraway land ruled by a king. He was a good king and ruled his land well, and the people were happy. But then the good king died."

"New king."

"Yes, they needed a new king. Hush, my dear. Now his son was king, and he ruled all the land. But he was not a very good ruler at all. He was selfish and cruel and undid many of the good works his father began, for he did not understand the wisdom of them. And the people were sad, and the land cried out for help.

"Now there were many wise men in this land, for wise men always flourish in a time of good kings. These wise men had long memories and remembered many rulers. And they came together and said, 'The father was good and just, but even so his son is unfit for the throne. What of the new king's heir, and his heir after that? How can we trust the line of kings? How shall we secure the happiness of our land?'

"The wise men came forth and put this question to the people. And the people said, 'Let us cast off the bad king and rule ourselves. For only the people can be trusted with their own fate.' And so the wise men led them against the bad king, and they threw him down and gave the rule of the land to the people.

"But there is a dark secret in the hearts of men, my dear. While the lone man may be wise, the many are foolish. To give the rule to the people was to place their fates in the hand of the mob, that drags every member of it down to the mud. The mob is foolish and brays for blood and sport. It gives no thought to tomorrow, and even in the face of its own destruction it will think only of its base desires. Under the rule of the mob the land plunged itself into chaos and despair. And so again the wise men came together and asked, 'How shall we secure the happiness of our land?'

"And at last they understood that the only way to do such a thing was to rule the land themselves. Not as a king upon a throne; but in secret, as guardians of the people, as humble servants. So they swore solemn oaths, pledging their lives and lands and fortunes to each other, and vowed to watch over the land. Their order would be bound together by a single ideal, able to change, yet preserving all the wisdom of those who had gone before. In each age there would be men who were wise, men who were worthy, and together they would guide the course of the world.

"So do not be afraid, my sweet girl. Do not fear the darkness. Those who keep the world are always watching. And they will always keep you safe. Do you remember their words?"

"Lux."

 _"Lux omnia vincit,_ my darling. Very good."

 

**} //-----END TRANSMISSION-------;**


	2. Entrypoint

"I hate bars."

"You do not."

"I do. I hate bars. I hate the noise, I hate the people. I hate the shitty techno they always play."

"You like techno."

"No I don't! Everyone just fucking assumes that I do! I hate it. And you know why? Years of having to sit in shitty clubs like this and listen to shitty techno!"

"Dude, are you mixing pills again?"

"My levels are fine."

"Because if you are, let me have some."

"Fuck off."

An alcoholic silence.

"Bad goddamn job."

The man making this pronouncement leaned back as he did it, reclining on his barstool with drunken ease as he steadied yet another beer in the no man's land between the countertop and his lips. Stray beams of colored LED light escaping from the dance floor played over his skin, glittering off the polygons stamped in an orderly row along the right side of his head. The hack-jacks themselves were unremarkable, but the hair around them was dyed and shaved into complex shapes, rays and lines and patterns of crop-circle complexity meant to draw the eye. Not that a man of his size and shape required accessories to attract the wary gaze of patrons in one of Hong Kong's less reputable drinking establishments.

"Bad goddamn job," agreed the man perched next to him after a moment, voice pitched loud over the muffled thunder of the bass that vibrated the building. He cast a glance over his shoulder before taking a drink from his own beer. He was whip-thin and dressed in old blacks, like the slim line of a wireless antenna; he wore his dark hair long, covering his own jacks. Bright orange streaks ran through it like the blazons of a venomous snake.

"Bad goddamn job for bad goddamn people," repeated the first man, his beer at last completing the journey to his mouth.

“Yeah,” said his partner, a quick snap in his voice suggesting he was either far more sober or far more drunk than he appeared. He perched on the edge of his seat as if at any moment he might launch himself off it, like a hawk atop a precipice.

The big man finished off his bottle. "Hey!" he yelled to the wiry figure tending bar; when the man turned, he wiggled the empty bottle in the air. Over at the other end of the bar another of the locals was playing a game before a bored, half-drunk audience, something that involved slapping little ceramic cups against the hard plastic of the bartop, _tack tack tack_.

The bartender rolled his eyes even as he went to find another bottle of the hideous import brew they kept on hand to shut the pair of laowei up. It didn't matter how much the owners were getting paid; whatever business kept the two augs camping out for the past three months in the mess of vacant rooms above the club could not conclude soon enough for him. The big man, the one his boss called Waverider, was just big and annoying and constantly stoned on designer neurochems; but the thin one, Diamondback, had an intensity that he wanted nothing to do with, a focus that only sharpened. The idiots brought no business to the brokers, who connected men of resources with men of skill; these two were bought and paid for on contracts of far too high a price to be negotiated in a bar's back room. All they were going to fetch was trouble, sooner or later, when their incredible ability to piss off everyone around them finally overcame some hopped-up thug's wariness of those polygonal studs in their skulls.

"At least the bad ones still pay good," concluded Wave. "No wonder. But. At least it's done." He lolled back on his barstool, never quite managing to topple over.

"Yeah," said Diamondback again. "All done."

"I'm taking a vacation after this one," continued Wave, in the misguided belief that his drinking partner was listening. "Long one. Then I'm taking a nice easy job, in and out. Nice easy job with proper criminals."

Diamondback stared after the bartender now heading towards the back room. "You ever think about going straight, Wave?" he asked.

Wave looked over at him, startled. _Tack tack tack_ , went the ceramic cups. “What, like, ditch the gear? White hat work?” he said, incredulous.

"Maybe not all the gear," amended his partner. “But, yeah. Lose the arch. Go lawful."

Wave shook his head. "What, you thinking about it?”

“I asked first,” snapped Diamondback.

Wave seemed to see the justice in that, or at least in the double digits’ worth of beers he had already consumed. It was the first chance either runner had had to drink in several months without a dehydrogenase chaser to soak up the chemical before they got more than buzzed. Neither of them had been able to afford ethanol floating around in their neurochem. Not when doing what they had been doing.

"Dunno," he answered. "I played at it once, before I had my full rig. Boring as hell."

"Didn’t stick, I see," said Diamondback, rolling the beer bottle back and forth on the edge of its base.

Wave snickered. "You don't know what it's like, being a citizen. Being like everyone else."

“Who says I don’t?”

Wave snickered again, waving a hand dismissively. "Oh, man, it’s obvious. You’re totally, like, what’s that thing with birds where they don’t put them in cages?”

"Escaped?"

"Free-range. You’re free-range. It's the - the thing with the scorpion and the frog. The natural order. You never been on the right side of the law, it’s dead clear." He snorted. "You wouldn’t last a month."

 _Tack tack tack,_  a shout in Cantonese, and the showman raised something into the air: a marble, clutched between finger and thumb, the glass splintering the dim lights of the bar. The audience broke out in murmurs, patrons nudging each other and pointing. DB shook his head in exasperation, fine strands of glowing wire glittering through his hair. His partner watched him with his lip curled in a peculiar grin. "Not even a month, man," he pronounced. "Not even a month."

DB opened his mouth to speak, then paused as the bartender arrived with the fresh drinks, refusing to leave until the two runners flipped a coin to settle who would pay him. Wave lost, and grumbled as he handed over a crumpled wad of paper currency. They had closed their rather extensive tab earlier that night and the Chinese man was demanding cash for anything further.

"I was just floating the concept,” said Diamondback, once the man had left and Wave had stopped accusing him of rigging the coin toss, which he had. He popped the lid off the new bottle with the handle of the switchblade in his front pocket and took a long drink. "Given that we’re cashing out with enough for early retirement. Maybe it's time to think about it."

"You kidding? With CAP20 coming down in a couple months? 2020's gonna be the year the whitehats went extinct. All the fun's on our side of the fence now." Wave glanced over and caught sight of his partner’s expression over his newly opened beer. "This really has you bothered, doesn't it," he said, sounding puzzled. "Can’t be the first rep job you’ve run."

“Course not,” said Diamondback, taking a drink. The showman went back to his game, ceramic clicking against plastic, the marble disappearing under the cups.

"Yeah, but this time you liked him," said Wave.

Diamondback glanced up sharply. "I said no such thing," he rattled off.

"Ahhhhh, I know you liked him," said Wave. He drank. "Cheer up," he said. "He got off easy. Just loses his job, is all. Better than being dead." _Tack tack tack,_  went the sound of the game.

"Still ruining his life," said Diamondback.

"Oh, he'll be fine," opined Wave. "One day they might even let him run a company again. Or at least work at one. I'm just glad it's over. Bad one, DB. Like when there's a big signal nearby and it's messing with you. A hum on the wires. You know when they talk about 'things man wasn't meant to know'?"

"Yeah," said DB. "That's horseshit."

"I dunno," said Wave, briefly without his usual vacant cheer. "Maybe there's something to it. Don't always want to look behind the scenery. I mean. Sometimes the curtain is there for a reason."

"You continue to make no sense," said DB.

"I'm just glad the damn thing's over, is all I'm saying," said Wave. "Feels like 2017. Op Sunshine? Some bad shit."

"Yeah." Diamondback had to agree. A little too much like 2017.

"There's a hum," muttered Wave. "A hum on the wires.” Diamondback ignored him in favor of staring at his beer as though still jacked in, immersed in a doubled reality.

"I was there," said Wave suddenly. "When Cicada went down. I was tapped in. Minor clan."

Diamondback looked at him sideways, head lolling a little on his shoulders. "No shit," he said, genuinely surprised.

"Swear it," said Wave.

"How'd you get out, then?" said Diamondback.

"I fucking ran like hell," said Wave with a snort, "what d'you think I did? I cut the line and I never looked back."

There was a sudden silence from the audience at the other end of the bar, broken by a single phrase; the sound of scraping cups, and then a long exhalation of disappointment. Diamondback rolled his bottle back and forth along its bottom edge.

"But even though it was a bad one," he said, "you'd still never think about retiring."

Wave chuckled darkly. "Good runners don’t retire,” he said. "The rush on a job gone right? Nobody walks away from that."

 _"Bullshit!"_ his partner burst out, slapping his palm down on the stained countertop. "Fucking _bullshit_ , what are you on? We're not fucking - freedom fighters, asshole. We're street guns for hire, high-priced hatchet men. We're criminals. Eight-bit thugs in the world-city."

"Fuckin' A, man," said Wave, raising a wobbly bottle for a toast.

"No, you colossal fucking moron!" shouted Diamondback. He didn't catch the bartender's narrowed glance in his direction, then away, to the heavily-augmented golem in the corner. "That is not something to be proud of!"

"Whoa, dude, you _are_  mixing pills," said Wave, sitting back. "You should not have had that last beer."

Diamondback slammed his drink down on the bar and stood up, slipping off the barstool in a single motion that ended in a half-contained stagger.

“I’m out,” he announced, dropping a few bills on the counter.

“Got your stuff?” asked Wave, unperturbed.

“You can keep it,” said Diamondback. "It’s mostly burned anyway.”

“Cool,” said Wave. He didn’t turn as Diamondback stalked out of the bar; he knew it would be the last time he saw the hacker in the flesh, and he was right.

* * *

**working late again I see**   
** > who r u how are u doing thta**   
**I am a guest of your computer system**   
** > yu talk big kid but yu pikced the wrong cmapny to mess with**   
**I think you know im not some kid**   
**don't bother calling. your cybersec boss is currently indisposed**   
** > sombeody sent u**   
**yes**   
** > are u here to kill me**   
**what**   
**please**   
** > wat then**   
**destroy your reputation. evidence of embezzlement, fraud, falsification of research data and safety records. make sure no one will buy your products or give you a job or fund your work again**   
** > why**   
**I don't get paid to know that.**   
** > y**   
**why do you want to know**   
** > its all i have left isnt it**   
** > i know y anyway. we reached 2 high is that it? u work for taggert and his crowd they're all afraid of what we can do**   
**I dont work for Taggart**   
**I’m afraid youve pissed off much more serious people than him.**

 


	3. No Route To Host

The dreams were the worst part.

The nightmare sent him bolting upright in the bed, fighting a delirium of red-hot razors. He thrashed for a few panicked moments, tangled in the clammy sheets, groping for the glass of water on the bedside table. His fingers shook and he spilled half the liquid before he got it to his lips and drank, gulping down the rest without pause.

The sheets were soaked in sweat. He pulled himself out of the mess, flung them away from him, felt the cold air against burning skin. Then he lay back in the darkness and focused on breathing, deep and even, staring up into the shadows. The ceiling blinked in and out of existence as some stray electronic flashed, bathing the pale plaster in a staccato wash of blue. He tried not to think about throwing up. _Bad dream, that's all. Bad dream. Awake now. Wasn't real._  He let existence reassert itself, searching for the familiar weight of reality, the depth and shape that distinguished it from all those induced hallucinations.

It wasn't there. The dream battered against him, reaching up from subconscious depths. Liquid shadows pressed in in waves of blue. His heart stuttered in his chest. The darkness moved, thick with the unreal lights that burst behind closed eyes. His breathing quickened, coming short and shallow, his throat was constricting, the distant flicker humming faster and faster--

When he realized what was happening he attacked the bedside table a second time, hunting in the darkness for the small box placed there for just this emergency; but no little plastic cube met his reaching fingers. He stabbed at the lampswitch, blinded by the sudden brightness, and found it on the floor where he had knocked it over. He switched off the lamp, flipped up the tiny lid, tore the first of the paper-thin patches and grabbed for a second. A quick moment to think about left and right, and he slapped it over the artery, beneath his jaw. At first he felt nothing and his pulse jumped again; then a faint cold wash spread beneath his skin. His throat opened up, and he heaved in a deep, relieved breath. The writhing grasp inside his head eased. Reality sorted itself into dream and wakefulness, and the fear slunk back to the primal corners of his mind.

When the chemicals sloshing around his brain showed some signs of righting themselves, he lay back down on top of the covers and counted his augs.

One two three four five six; all reporting active, idling in standby mode, humming to themselves as they waited out the calibration period. Their responses were bland and unruffled, undisturbed by the randomly discharging neurotransmitters that threatened his biological components.

Another cascade. Nothing unexpected, even if he’d never suffered them this often before. Expecting it didn’t help, though. Nothing and no one helped aug-shock, and no one wanted to be around you when you were going through it anyway. The med routine would call for help in a worst-case scenario, but until then the only cure was time. Lots of time. He sighed. No datajack, no drink - no drinking for six whole months, not till the junctions had set - no drugs, no VR, only the TV and a stack of dusty paperbacks. Paper books! Medieval. They could have at least left him some decent videogames. Instead it was just him and microwave pizza and the view. And the dreams.

They weren't quite dreams. Couldn't be; he didn't dream, not anymore. But the raw emotion still boiled up from his lizard brain, lurking sullen at the core of his wetware, and now it thrashed in confusion as one unwelcome master was replaced by another.

The stabilizer dose washed through his nervous system, stretching calm fingers down his spine. Just a glitch, he told himself. Neurotransmitter cascade. Our PEDOT junctions are still forming, our neural pathways are reorganizing themselves. I know we aren't used to sleeping, but we need to let our neurons rewire. Nothing that we aren’t expecting, nothing we can't handle. Nothing was there. Nothing is after us.

Well. In fact, an awful lot of powerful people were after him, looking to string him up as a gruesome example.

Maybe the nightmares weren't entirely the neurotransmitters' fault.

* * *

“Where's your partner?”

“I don’t have a--”

“Your colleague on your last job. On our little assignment for you. He went by the handle Diamondback. Where is he?”

“I don’t know. Why would I know that? We finished the job, we split. I thought we were cool. We were cool, we ran the job, nobody saw us. What do you want with DB?”

“Did your associate plant the data itself?”

“Yeah, I did the pen work, he stashed everything. DB runs the inside better than the outside. He likes traps. He always finds the best hiding places.”

“Were you involved in the creation of the payload?”

“Like, the trigger signatures and stuff? Yeah, we both had a copy. In case they burned jacks on us. I’ve still got one, but it should have gone off by now. All the data should be there, guys. Everything was fine.”

“Were you ever in danger of compromise?”

“No way, man, we scrambled their cyberchief like three days in, made it look like he hit a short in their own network. Their security was swiss cheese, total pushover.”

“Did either one of you have any contact with David Sarif?”

“Hell no. Why would we talk to that guy? What are you guys doing back here asking me all these questions? We did the job, man! I thought we were cool!”

* * *

He pushed himself upright and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, paused for a moment, then stood up, throwing the covers back and straightening them out. The pounding in his head had waned, but it pulsed around the edges of awareness.

The bathroom light was still on, spilling out in a hairline fracture from beneath the closed door. He pushed it open slowly, wincing at the painful blue edge of the fluorescents (one of his augs pinged softly, letting him know that there were substantial UV and IR components to it, and did he want to see them; another one rippled and let him know about the wash of microwaves as he walked through stray radiation from the hotel’s wireless, and would he like to know about all the signals and where they were coming from; he told them both _no, go back to sleep_ ) and rested his hands on the edge of the sink. He had never gotten used to the harsher glare of fluorescent lights, not after a childhood spent with old, hot, energy-wasting lightbulbs. The bare bulbs were miniature suns you could warm your hands over against the chill of the wind, and if you stared at them for long enough they began to play strange tricks on your vision, brightening and fading. But when he brushed his fingers along the line of the fluorescents, all he felt was a faint buzz, giving off no more heat than moonlight.

The fluorescents weren’t kind. The light picked out every color in his skin, every nuance of the bruises spilling out from his temples, turning dozens of different shades by now. The fresh hack-jack constellation stamped along the side of his skull still stung, each nerve a pinprick of sensation along the hairline scars left behind by the microsurgery bots. He rubbed the side of his head as if scratching a phantom itch, running a hand over the stubble where the hair was starting to grow back. He hadn't redyed it yet and it was coming in a kind of coffee brown that he faintly recalled being its natural color.

He rubbed his fingertips together, curious to see if his skin felt any different. Even the fluorescents could find no sign of the fractal antennas growing beneath it, the elaborate snowflake of extruded wiring blooming across his body. For the moment he would have to take it on faith that it was there. He leaned in to the mirror, over the sink, turning his head. No signs of infection, or worse, rejection, just the long streaked colors of the bruises unfurling from gleaming polygons of surgical titanium. The aug jacks themselves were sleek and unobtrusive, their design undoubtedly repurposed military. Everything looked as promised. Good. He was going to need every advantage he could get.

* * *

**> its all teh same anywya. i wnt stop without a fight though u know that**   
**you can't beat me.**   
**there's no point in fighting.**   
** > i'll fight anyway this is all i have you get that??? this is my life this is my work this is important to huamnity i will not give up**   
**look we r the threat they will come with a carrot**   
**just say yes and take it**   
**none of this has to happen**   
** > bulshit**   
** > i know who u wrk for they came 2 me before asked me to join then i told them to shove it up their ass they dint like that**   
** > thyre the past they want thw world not to change becuz then thy might not be in charge**   
** > they think theyrs saving humanity but rly theyre killing us we werent meant 2 stand still**   
** > we can be better**   
** > u would not be here without augs right**   
** > ppl are afraid f change anything that changes their world but the world doesnt stay still humans are huamns becuz they adapt**   
** > we are the future**   
** > so do it then becuz i wont stop**   
** > ill tear them all down**   
** > ill never stop.**

* * *

He splashed cold water on his face and wiped it with a handtowel, washing away the sweat and the chill, and tried not to wince at the light. Nine days in - he thought it was nine, that was how many times the cable networks had switched over to late-night infomercials - and he still felt like someone had taken out his brains with an ice cream scoop. Reasonable, after having had a full neural architecture stripped out and replaced inside of a week, not to mention a neural hub and four separate augs. The fine mesh of the new architecture was still growing into his disordered brain, chemical electrodes intertwining with long dendritic branches. No matter how many times the surgeons assured him the new architecture would take, he kept waiting for the first signs that his scarred neurons were rejecting it. The whole thing was dicey at best, Russian roulette with his central nervous system. Dicey, yet necessary, if he were truly going to ditch his old fist. And so the neurotransmitters sloshed about, confused, swirling like a great flock of starlings whose roost had vanished, a set of teetering dinnerware that had had the tablecloth yanked out from under it. He sympathized.

* * *

**> To: D. Sarif (freneticpony@internal.si.com)**   
** > From: 235.23.148.16 (@mobile.sec-ex.cn // WARNING: MISSING OR OMITTED PATH DATA)**   
** > Subject: [none]**   
** >**   
** > in 2 days yr milwaukee jnction datacenter will go down. swap out the following servers: 23c, 17a, 42j. physically destroy them. mk it look like an**   
** > accident. destroy all backup tapes for 07.17. and fire yur it department.**   
** >**   
** > \-- a guest**

* * *

The damp towel went into the sink, the lights went off; but he didn’t go back to bed, not yet. For a few moments he paced in the darkness of the room, stretching cramped muscles, walking the space in which he’d been confined for the last week and a half the way a tiger walked its cage. He found the source of the electronic blinking: a new data tablet had turned up on the desk while he’d been locked in delirium and nightmares. It was in danger of sliding off a bubble envelope stuffed to roundness, and flashing its bright blue “message received” light. He searched his real memory - the chipmem as yet unengaged, his life currently off the record - and came up with voices in the room, a heavy tread, and a snapped order to leave the damn lights off. Hmm.

He picked up the tablet and tapped the screen. It came awake much more readily than he had; a little graphic spooled as the Pocket Secretary tried to contact Multiplicity, only to be shunted off to another set of servers instead. He was browsing messages a few seconds later. This PSec was to keep, apparently, and could he not tear it apart like he had the last one (well, leave him in this room for so long with nothing to do and certain things were going to happen) and by the way, all the goods were in the envelope, so have a look and report if there were any problems. Actually he was to “lt me no if aynthing needs 2 be dun”; David Sarif’s typing habits left something to be desired. Hopefully nothing would need to be dun.

He picked up the envelope and left the tablet on the desk, its bar of lights now a content green, and went to the window. A quick peek between the curtains confirmed that it wasn’t morning and therefore safe to open them; he flung them wide, and only then remembered that all he was wearing was a white t-shirt, and then remembered that he was also on the thirty-third floor in a dark room in the middle of the night and no one cared.

When he had fallen asleep it had been day; now it was dark again, or as dark as it got in the overcast night of a big city. He had no sense of what time it was, or even which night. One of his augs pinged quietly in the back of his head, letting him know that that information was available, that it could pinpoint him anywhere in time and space; he let it be. The clouds shrouded the sky. Beneath the misty ceiling Detroit lay washed in yellow-orange, the distinctive glow of the low-pressure sodium vapor in the streetlamps. The monochrome light turned everything to gold, or, if one were in a darker frame of mind, piss-yellow, lighting up the belly of the clouds for miles. He picked out Sarif Industries’ twin towers arcing above the downtown skyline, bright bars of light mottled by strange silhouettes, reaching for the lowering sky. Off in the distance jets and VTOLs buzzed around the airport, appearing from the clouds as they descended and disappearing just as suddenly on takeoff, as if they were teleporting from destination to destination.

His fist was gone. He was still mulling over that, and even looking out across the fullness of a city he had never seen before, his mind couldn’t stop orbiting that thought. It had been a part of him for so long, literally a part of him, and now it was something else. He didn't miss it. It wasn't something you missed. It was just his fist, his signature, the unique fingerprint of innate neural pathways and the idiosyncratic growth of aug junctions. It had been with him since the day they had laced the first tendrils of the integrated neural architecture down his spine, growing the fully-immersive network that separated a real runner from someone with a VR aug and a bad attitude, and he had assumed it would be with him until the day he died. And now it was gone, the signature changed out of recognition by the experimental scorched-earth surgery. Stripping and replacing an architecture wasn't supposed to be possible. Conventional wisdom said the new one wouldn't take. But no one seemed to have told Sarif that.

He wondered if any of the old radio techs who had first coined the term had ever tried to alter their fists, sending the little Morse code dits and dahs in some other style, mimicking some other operator. He wondered if they had felt this strange doing it. With his fist had gone his handle, or rather the nebulous constellation of handles that had accreted around it - Diamondback, [3lizzard, blind_fire and all the rest - all his contacts, his rep, his backdoors and known havens and favors both owed and owing, his partnerships and enmities. All gone, just like that.

The surgeons had even taken his tattoo, the little blinking laser dot erasing the snake silhouette etched down his back. He could still feel its phantom coils winding through his vertebrae.

He tore open the envelope, ripping through the thick plastic, and started sorting the ident docs inside. Sarif had gone ahead and handled that for him via one of his old contacts - had been far too excited to do so, playing criminal, playing spy - so that everything could be entered into the databases and backdated before he arrived. He inventoried the contents, checking them against the usual list. New phone, nice model, excellent. Passport, driver's license, birth certificate - it seemed that he had now been born in the Northeastern United States, that was new, and that Sarif had inexplicably lopped a few years off his claimed age. Well, it had always been a guess anyway. Credit cards, both corporate and personal, tied to clean accounts; a handful of the new credit chips, the anonymous digital cash replacements. Social Security. God, he had to pay taxes now, didn’t he. As if he’d ever collect. A bike garage membership. Aww. Sarif had a businessman's knack for remembering the personal details. Health insurance. My god. He had health insurance now. He had never, not once in his entire life, had health insurance.

Somehow that was the one that got him, left him staring at the little white plastic card with its lines of stamped black text. Employer-subsidized health insurance with extended augmentation coverage. Somehow that made it all real. A real life, not one to be borrowed and tossed aside. The information society was a living, breathing tangle, a network of humanity offering itself up to its own gaze; and to be someone else required stepping into a silhouette that had been etched at great pain into the tumble of data. That cost. But the cost had been paid, and so the numbers had changed. All he had left to do was pick up the weight of it, wrap a single name around himself, and figure out how to be a citizen.

He flipped open the thick blue cover of the passport, running an unconscious finger over the embedded RFID chip, and studied the details of his new life by the lights of the city. Almost at once he decided that he didn't like his parents.

 _Pritchard is fine,_  he thought. _But who names their poor kid Francis Wendell?_

* * *

At dawn the Hong Kong harbor patrol fished yet another body out of the oil-slicked waters. The face was half-ruined and unrecognizable, the augs torn out and burnt, but the hair along the side of the skull was still shaved into complex patterns, rays and circles and lines.

* * *

**> thank you**   
**don't thank me. they will send another.**   
**you won't get lucky a second time**   
** > how can i stop them**   
**you can't.**   
** > but u could**   
**yes.**   
** > then help me.**


End file.
